Page 2610 - Week 08 - Thursday, 24 August 2006
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That the report of the functional review be tabled immediately by the government to ensure that a fully informed debate about the 2006 ACT budget can take place.
While we are talking about arrogance and obfuscation, let me just echo the points Mr Smyth has made—I will not repeat them ad nauseam; we do not have time for that today—about the shocking behaviour of the minister for TAMS in not cooperating with the committee, failing to come clean on the very important issues he was seeking to have funding appropriated for and treating, really, the committee process with contempt. I am confident that all of my committee colleagues would agree with that observation. There will be more said about that later.
The Chief Minister, Jon Stanhope, must publicly reveal what the recently completed Costello review has to say about the public service. How can we be confident that the funds we are appropriating today are being expended properly and legitimately, and even spent in accordance with the findings of the Costello review, if we have not been able to examine it for ourselves? It is not that we doubt the Chief Minister’s word. We are about to appropriate hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ dollars on behalf of the community, yet we do not have a clear enough picture of where this funding is going and why.
Given that the review was going to examine the full spectrum of public expenditure in the ACT, there must have at least been some discussion of the funding aspects, if not resourcing and staffing, in areas such as ACT Policing and ESA, included in the report. Why was there not transparent comment by ministers on at least those areas? Nobody expected a minister to say “Okay. Yes, I have 14 X staff allocated to this function. That is why we need to appropriate funding to fund those particular positions.” If at least two of the ministers could have been more forthcoming in saying, “Look, we are fairly close to finalising. I can give you a 95 per cent answer,” the committee would perhaps have been reasonably happy with that. But no, that did not occur either.
The ACT community expects the government to ensure the provisions of adequate policing numbers to manage the territory’s policing needs. However, the government has failed dismally on that front so far. Yet we do not know what the functional review says on these sorts of things. Costello must have had a view on ACT Policing capability. The ACT effectively has less police than it did 20 years ago per head of population. This is despite a huge increase in population, an increase in federal government infrastructure and responsibilities, and increased security threats since that time.
It is not just the areas of policing and ESA that are of concern. We have school closures and teacher cuts looming on the horizon; we have shopfront services being cut; we have pay parking introduced at hospitals; we have a decline in ranger services in TAMS. In fact, if I can just focus on that for a second, over four years we have had a blowout in senior public servants and consultants, while concurrently we have seen a degradation of front line public service positions. Did the functional review address that imbalance? The Chief Minister might say so, but he has not demonstrated that under the scrutiny of estimates.
There are so many areas that are deeply affecting the community, yet the Chief Minister does not have the bottle to show the community why these things are necessary by releasing the functional review. Therefore, the Chief Minister must release that review
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